‘If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?’

According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted.

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don’t fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades.

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Archive: http://archive.today/sgl5M

  • towerful@programming.dev
    2·
    4 days ago

    I haven’t experienced “2 or 3 prompts later” regression.
    I have found asking it to queue changes until I ask for it to work on the queue.
    Maybe ask it to produce a single file for review, or tell it how to modify a file (and why, it likes an explanation).
    But always stack up changes, ask it to review it’s queue of changes etc.
    Then ask it to do it in a one-er.
    Although, this is the first time claude said such a request will take a long time (instead of showing it’s working/thinking and doing it is 20 minutes).
    Maybe this is when it starts forgetting why it did things.